Centennial-based ULA unveiled the Next Generation Launch System Monday at the 31st annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, the space industry’s premier international conference.

ULA currently makes the Atlas and Delta rockets used to send the majority of U.S. missions into space. ULA CEO Tory Bruno vowed to cut the cost and time of launch in half when he took the company helm in August.

In order to do this, a new, evolved rocket is needed — especially with increased competition from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which also is exploring reusable rocket technology.

Vulcan is the answer, Bruno said.

Reusability is central to Vulcan, from fuel to the rocket’s booster main engines.

The booster engines, which are the most expensive part of the rocket’s first stage, will be reused. Once the booster detaches, it will — protected by an inflatable heat shield — head back to Earth to be snatched out of the air and recovered by a helicopter.

A parachute will then slow the descent further, allowing the helicopter crew to deploy a large boom and pick it up out of the air.

Of course, this being aerospace, there’s an acronym for this — it’s called the Sensible, Modular, Autonomous Return Technology initiative, or SMART.

“We took a systems engineer’s approach to what on the rocket was actually valuable,” Bruno said. “This will take up to 90 percent of the propulsion cost out of the booster.”

The rocket, which at first will have a single booster stage and a high-energy Centaur stage — currently used on the Atlas rocket — can hold either a 4- or 5- meter-diameter payload fairing, which is standard. It can be augmented by up to six solid rocket boosters, depending on configuration.

In its second iteration, Vulcan will eventually replace the Centaur second stage with new tech called Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage (ACES).

ACES has an ultra-lightweight balloon tank that holds three times the propellant, giving a 75 percent performance increase. It also has an advanced internal-combustion engine that will be a game changer, Bruno said.

This engine, which is being built with race car manufacturer Roush Automotive, will recycle waste propellants into electrical power. This gives it the capability of almost unlimited burns, which can greatly extend on-orbit operating time from days to weeks.

The engine is about the size of a lawn mower engine, said George Sowers, ULA’s vice president of strategic architecture.

The goal is to get costs down to less than $100 million per launch from the $225 million spent today, Bruno said. This will be helped along by ULA’s implementation of the new Blue Origin BE-4 engine, which will replace the Russian-made RD-180 engine, banned for use in the U.S. after 2019. Blue Origin is owned by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.

Vulcan will sit atop two BE-4 engines, boosting the power to 1.1 million pounds of thrust — a big jump over the RD-180’s 930,000 pounds of thrust.

Vulcan will be implemented in stages, with SMART prior to ACES — a decision propelled by the urgency caused by the RD-180’s exit, Bruno said.

Bruno, in a February interview with The Denver Post, said the Vulcan will be able to adapt to needs of any future space mission, whether that’s outer planetary exploration, low-Earth orbit science missions, military satellite launches, or eventually ferrying workers to space and back on a daily basis.

“We decided the span of requirements to go to space is going to be even broader than it is today,” Bruno said in that interview. “We’ve designed NGLS to do everything we do today, plus more.”

ULA, formed in 2006 as a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co., has about 3,400 employees, with about 1,500 in Colorado. Delta and Atlas program employees — the majority of them in the company’s Centennial headquarters — are currently shifting onto the Vulcan team.

The Delta will stop production in 2018, and Bruno expects the last flight to be in 2019. However, he said he has promised to keep the Delta IV heavy rocket available until the U.S. Air Force is “able to gracefully transition to the Vulcan rocket.”

Bruno expects that transition to be complete by 2023 or 2024.

The new rocket technology will be paid for from company profits, Bruno said, and ULA will continue to launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla. and Vandenberg Air Force Base in Calif.

ULA held a contest to name the new rocket, which was first announced in The Denver Post. The initial three names were Eagle, Freedom and GalaxyOne. Due to fan input, the additional names Zeus and Vulcan were added.

“As the company currently responsible for more than 70 percent of the nation’s space launches, it is only fitting that America got to name the country’s rocket of the future,” Bruno said.

More than 1 million votes were cast in the naming poll, with Vulcan getting about two-thirds of the votes, Bruno said.

Bruno also teased an upcoming program called “Fast Buy, Ready Launch,” which will likely position ULA as a one-stop shop for launch services, giving customers a standard product offering at a fixed price with a menu of add-on modules.

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